View from the Zoo: Packed day of fun at home educators day

Sarah Mills

The education centre at Flamingo Land recently hosted a spring home educators day with over 30 families attending for a day full of activities and events.

One of the activities was a predator versus prey site-wide game where all participants wear a badge stating either ‘predator’ or ‘prey’ at the top and when they see someone with the opposite badge they have to roar at each other. The first person to roar wins the round. If this is the ‘predator’, the ‘prey’ must surrender their ‘life card’ they then become a ‘predator’.

The objectives are to collect the most life cards or to be the longest surviving prey. The game was first devised by Chester zoo and has been hugely popular there. We hope to roll out the game to the public during the summer for special predator versus prey game days.

The zoo tour was enormously popular despite the sleet and cold winds with lots of animals viewed and a very interactive encounter with the lemurs.

Other workshops included ‘What Do Zoos Do?’ where individuals acted as zoo conservation scientists, finding and measuring the animals they found and African Rangers where individuals had to guess the animal from the clues left behind.

The group were joined by the team from the birdshow at the end of the adaptations and bird beaks workshop which involved using different tools to test out the effectiveness of bird beaks for picking up different food sources. The birdshow team brought across an owl and a parrot to show us the differences in their beaks.

The day ended with a relaxing animal art workshop. Lots of people made badges of the animals they had seen during the day and a range of paper plate creatures including cockroaches, jellyfish and pufferfish.

The day was a real success and we are looking forward to the next home educators event in the autumn.

All the activities mentioned above and more are available as part of the educational activities for schools or uniformed groups.

Contact the education team on zooeducation@flamingoland.co.uk to find out more about the educational activities on offer.